by Greg Grime
A great way of ensuring that your children will respect your choice of becoming a trout bum is to begin their indoctrination early. Even as newborns, nothing is wrong with letting them see and touch your premium pelts and feathers as they marvel at your fly-tying station. And when they see the finished products, as you feverishly crank them out of your vise, carefully arrange them in your fly box, followed by them playing with and cleaning up the myriad of scraps-they will be hooked-for life.
No child is able to resist the allure of a smorgasbord of fly-tying materials. Right in front of their eyes, they watch as something already interesting in itself -thread-feathers-fur- of varying colors, shapes, patterns, and sizes, meld into nothing short of a masterpiece by the same hands that feed and hug them when times are good and bad. What you craft is nothing short of a van Gogh to them and they look at you like you didn't just hang the blue-moon but you built it and hired the Man on the Moon to keep watch.